Venyu Blog

Maybe I’m not the lone voice in the wilderness after all. There really are like-minded individuals who understand that despite the best intentions and a desperate need to cling to legacy solutions, using tape to backup, store or archive data – especially in light of e-discovery motions – is a fault-filled and  costly data protection strategy.

Penned by Behzad Behtash, the Information Week article is flush with eye-opening anecdotes on organizations that have relied exclusively on tape in response to potential or ongoing litigation. As examples, Behtash calls out a 2009 judgment of more than $1 million against a defendant for failing to retrieve information stored on backup tapes. But even that figure is eclipsed by the $6 million judgment, also in 2009, against the government’s Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight for failing to produce electronically stored information (ESI) subpoenaed for documents in litigation involving Fannie Mae.

A representative of a third-party provider of e-discovery and legal services to corporations interviewed for the article recounts that on one job his team restored 4TB of e-mail from almost 500 backup tapes. The cost to the client of indexing, deduplication and searching for relevant ESI — a process that took nearly two years?  More than $8 million.

Still, there are alternatives. For example, Behtash calls out vendors that let companies scan, catalog, and restore data from tapes without having to recreate the application environment. These “appliances,” which can access a variety of tape formats, effectively index data on the tape, and make all the data (up to 70 TB per instance), searchable.  All this and more for the rock bottom price of only $150,000 per appliance.

Although the author makes a valid comparison between tape used for backup data and tape used to archive it, with costs like these, tape isn’t just fumbling towards extinction, it’s sprinting.